Dr. Anne Parle-McDermott, Dublin City University: "Applying molecular genetics expertise to biosensing questions" This seminar will describe both a career and a research interest journey. Having worked with nucleic acids for over 25 years it has been interesting to apply my knowledge and expertise of molecular genetics to a range of research questions. The main interest of my group has been to understand the role of the essential B vitamin, folate, for human health with a particular interest in…

  Dr. Sara Branco, University of Colorado Denver: "The genetic basis of fungal adaptation." Dr. Sara Branco completed her Ph.D. in Evolutionary Biology from the University of Chicago as a Fulbright scholar, was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of California, Berkeley and a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Paris. She has been studying fungi since she was 16 years old and earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Lisbon (Portugal). Currently Dr. Branco is an…

  Dr. Phoebe Cohen, Williams College: "The earliest history of eukaryotes: integrating biological and geological data" Website: https://geosciences.williams.edu/profile/pac3/ hosted by Jacquelyn Gill

  Dr. Víctor Ortega-Jiménez and Dr. Zhao Xuan, University of Maine: "New Faculty Lightning Talks" We wrap up our fall 2022 seminar series with our two new faculty members!

Tayo Adekeye:  Mutations in myosin regulatory light chain protein cause disordered sarcomere assembly in zebrafish muscle Sarcomeres are the basic contractile unit of muscle, in which myosin-rich thick filaments interact with actin-based thin filaments to generate contractile force. Tightly bound to the head of the myosin heavy chain is Mylpf; a regulatory light chain protein that stabilizes the myosin lever arm and is essential for normal myosin activity. In humans, rare MYLPF gene variants cause a limb contracture disease called…

Dr. Gail Schwieterman, University of Maine School of Marine Sciences: "Dueling Stressors: Mimicking the natural environment in lab-based studies" Coastal and estuarine fishes have the physiological mechanisms necessary to thrive in highly variable habitats, witnessing large changes in dissolved oxygen, pH, and temperature on both daily and seasonal time scales. Understanding how these stressors limit each other at different levels of biological organization can help shed light on the physiological processes that are impacted by acute environmental stress. Here, I…

Dr. Chaofan Chen, University of Maine School of Computing and Information Science: "Interpretable Case-based Deep Learning for DNA Classification" The use of deep neural networks has become increasingly popular, especially for computer vision and natural language processing tasks. In the genomics domain, deep learning has also received increasing attention, and has been used for classifying DNA sequences, predicting the effect of non-coding regions, and associating genes with phenotypes. Despite the impressive accuracy achieved by deep learning models in genomics tasks,…

Dr. Brian McGill, University of Maine School of Biology and Ecology: The futures of ecology A poll of the graduate students who invited me  revealed that they most wanted to hear me talk about succeeding as a graduate student, future trends in ecology, and my research on trends in biodiversity. Thus I will address the future of three different senses of the word "ecology". The first two topics were mostly covered by me in various blog posts on Dynamic Ecology,…

Dr. Lauren Azevedo-Schmidt, UMaine School of Biology and Ecology, and Climate Change Institute Bridging the gap between modern and paleoecology from ferns to plant-insect interactions Abiotic and biotic processes influence plant and insect herbivore species, a pattern that has been occurring across millions of years. By bridging the gap between modern and paleoecological studies we can more accurately root our understanding of community dynamics against the backdrop of the geologic record. This is especially important given current global change, which…